The Bye Bye Man (2017) Review!!!

Synopsis – Three friends stumble upon the horrific origins of the Bye Bye Man, a mysterious figure they discover is the root cause of the evil behind man’s most unspeakable acts.

My Take – Knowing how bad January release horror films are, I went into this one expected to be disappointed. A film like this, with this title, I expected to be a spoof or parody, or at least a horror-comedy. But even I was surprised at how bad this was. This film is a prime example of how an already flawed horror film concept can be made even worse with studio intervention and money whoring. It’s obvious that the studio had no faith in the team producing this and wanted to hedge its bet by making it a PG-13 title instead of giving it a chance with an R. The result being, the film is not at all scary even to a degree. The jump scares will not make you jump, the pacing is poor, the acting is flat and completely unbelievable, and the plot is vague and filled with loose ends and holes, plus anything with significance is left completely unexplained. I left the theater with a lot of unanswered questions. Where does the titular character originate from? Who the hell is he? Why does he have a dog or hell hound type thing? Why is a nightstand the most significant thing about this entity? What do these coins that keep dropping everywhere have to do with anything? I’m sure we’ve all seen films that are “so bad they’re good,” but in the instance of this film, the only humor would be the laughably bad acting.

Based on one chapter of Robert Damon Schneck‘s non-fiction book “The President’s Vampire” the story follows three college students, boyfriend-girlfriend Elliot (Douglas Smith) and Sasha (Cressida Bonas), and their mutual friend, John (Lucien Laviscount), who move into an old, rundown house that they have rented off campus in a neighborhood, where back in 1969, a journalist named Larry (Leigh Whannell), while continuously repeating the words “Don’t think it. Don’t say it,” retrieved a shotgun from the trunk of his car & proceeded to shoot several family members and neighbors in order to “save” them from an unseen entity known as “The Bye Bye Man”. The ordinary-looking gunman felt that he had to eliminate those who have learned the name or spoken it to anyone else, once his rampage ends; he put himself out of his misery. As the three move the furniture which comes with the house up from the basement, they fail to notice that inside the drawer of a small end table, someone has written “Don’t think it. Don’t say it,” in concentric circles. The students do notice that a coin keeps falling to the floor and spinning and that the house is always cold. This leads Elliot to go do some research at the library where a helpful librarian (Cleo King) helps unravel the house’s forgotten past. The students also ask a “spiritual sensitive” friend named Kim (Jenna Kanell) to conduct a séance. The process of learning about this mysterious entity known as the Bye Bye Man (Doug Jones) results in his name being thought about and spoken out loud, which makes him appear – and allows him access to the minds of those who know his name. When inside the heads of his victims, he makes them see things that aren’t there, prompting them to do things they wouldn’t normally do with horrifying results. A police woman, detective Shaw (Carrie-Anne Moss) becomes involved when things get out of hand, but it’s nearly impossible for her to be of any help when those who know what is going on can’t tell her about it. The plot of the film is not bad, no one really has addressed this but this is easily the only thing that kept my interested throughout, not a new idea by any means, but the psychological aspect of the film kept me hooked. However, the film starts the obligatory parade of clichés by having a housewarming séance. They then immediately fall into false frights, unexplained phenomena, and a second act investigation requiring one or more of them to rummage through library records. All the while, any chance to flesh out our characters is eschewed in favor of everyone yelling “who did you tell!” I will admit that there are some very creepy parts to this film, yet watching this film I kept getting flashbacks on better horror films that presented bogeymen way better than this one did. I felt like I was watching a film that decided to reenact scenes from other films. Sure the entity has a ridiculous sounding name, but is a cool looking character and props to the costume designers for that one. It’s obvious director Stacy Title is trying to make her film something along the lines of Slender and A Nightmare on Elm Street, which I think is interesting enough. I love classic horror, and the film gave me feelings of not just Emperor Palpatine (from Star Wars), but Freddy Kruger as well. He’s an entity that doesn’t really exist but is claiming victims through their minds. Although I was pleasantly surprised at the beginning with the suspense, it gives up on any suspense after the first half hour or so and relies heavily on jump scares the rest of the way through to get any sort of audience reaction. It’s obvious this film got a lot cut from it when it was downgraded to PG-13. The film constantly brings up trains in relation to the villain but never explains its significance.

The entities’ origin, and reasoning behind all of the events it causes is truly never explained in the film, honestly coming off as an unexplained collection of scares, and film fillings toward the characters. Throughout this entire film, the characters all constantly get into ordeals with the entity, only giving the audience more of a want / wonderment toward the entity himself, only to be let down when the whole situation of the entity is never explained; Throughout the film, we get the characters figuring out pieces to the entities’ puzzle, honestly the typical, and cliché “Old / dead document that can’t be found anywhere else until now” gimmick seen in many, many other horror films. The characters all search, and find ways to stop temporarily, and prevent shortly the entity from provoking them, but really that’s just about it. Time, after time until another character just randomly dies from this entity, these characters are all running around solving pieces of this entity, for what seems to be fill time; Absolutely no reasoning, really. Some scenes approach the quality of mediocre DVD film. Even the CGI and some shots shown looked quite off, and questionable. At one point early in the film, Elliot yells from the other room “Let’s watch something stupid,” to his girlfriend who is distracted by haunting noise. We then cut to them sleeping. Plus, there was a lot of stuff shown in the beginning of the trailer not shown in the film which was quite disappointing too. The film had the potential to be good and they just dropped the ball. Yes, like I mentioned earlier, the setup does have possibilities. A minor character refers to him as a reaper so perhaps something salient could have been said about the specter of death and how it can warp our behavior. Or perhaps the character could be a parable of forgotten history. Another minor character makes the point that once you bury the story, “It’s like it never existed.” The film could have been an exploration of mass hysteria, a project exploring group think, exploring mental illness, exploring the never-ending march of time, It could have explored a lot of things is what I’m saying. Another thing you need to know is the acting is bad. At times it’s alright, at times it’s awful, and at times I cringed. Douglas Smith is charisma-less & overacts to the core, Cressida Bonas is shallow and Lucien Laviscount is underdeveloped (but still the most sympathetic of the three). Jenna Kanell is alright. Carrie-Anne Moss, as the token “famous” actor, despite showing experience, still fails to convince in a small role. Michael Trucco, Cleo King & Leigh Whannell are wasted, while, Doug Jones is good as the titular character. On the whole, ‘The Bye Bye Man’ is a lazy, boring and predictable film that seems like a collection of random, badly acted and completely scare less scenes.